SoundThread is joined by Original Ras Korby who one of the giants of African popular music. Our project is to meet with the emerging music communities and record their music with a view to setting up a recording studio and create an infrastructure to manufacture CD’s and facilitate for digital downloads. Because of Korby’s international status he has become connected to the Department of Culture in South Sudan. Korby is also the acting president of the Musicians Union.
Korby and Sam Jones, SoundThread’s founder, have agreed to produce an album with a variety of new generation Sudanese artists. Ideally we would record the album in the studio we intend to build. But for the project to progress initially we intend to use a mobile recording studio. This would keep the initial cost down and improve flexibility of location of the recording.
The long-term goal is to install a permanent studio. At this time we are not certain where the funding for this will be coming from. The case may well be that the government has a fund for this, but just at this time we are trying to astatine this information. As we undertake a project of this magnitude we obviously want to avoid the age-old Western module of dumping funds and resource into a community and walking away. We want to build up local skills by training potential staff for the studio. The best time to start this would be at the time of the recording of the collaboration album with Korby.
We believe that the kudos of Korby’s reputation along with a well produced film and commissioned radio show documenting the project, would allow us to gain enough exposure so that further involvement from a possible sponsors and/or funders would allow the project to progress to its ultimate goal.